


Focus on the Less Important Details

by SofiaDragon



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: A Bit Not Good, Backstory, Bad Parenting, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Could Be Canon, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mental Health Issues, Not A Fix-It, Over medication of a child, POV John Watson, Parent-Child Relationship, Possible Misdiagnosis, Post-Episode: s02e03 The Reichenbach Fall, Rationalizing, Regrets, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson Friendship, Suicidal Thoughts, good parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-28 22:33:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16251140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SofiaDragon/pseuds/SofiaDragon
Summary: John needs something to keep him going after watching Sherlock jump to his death. Sherlock's father comes to visit to talk about the mess left behind and unintentionally inspires the grieving soldier.---I wrote this as prep for NaNoWriMo, so any comments or feedback is welcome.





	Focus on the Less Important Details

There was a knock on the door to 221B Baker Street. The flat was quiet and still. John was sitting in his chair, as he had been since he'd finished washing up after breakfast. He was scheduled to work weekends at the clinic, and his phone would chime out the reminders so he was never late. A glance at his phone told him it was now half two, and a Wednesday. He wasn't quite sure where Tuesday had gone, but then Monday wasn't very memorable either. The last month blurred together into one gray smudge in his mind. Mrs. Hudson had agreed with John when he suggested disabling the bell for 221B during that blurred smudge of time given how many busybodies were popping by since Sherlock had been posthumously vindicated, everyone from former clients to perfect strangers wanting to deny they doubted the man now that Moriarty's lies had been exposed as slander. Anderson had come by several times, and been less welcome with each reappearance.

The knock came again and John rose to answer it, the hazy memory of Mrs. Hudson saying she was... was somewhere busy for much of this week getting him out of his seat. The man at the door was a pleasant enough looking gentleman significantly older than John with white hair and light brown eyes. He wore a jumper that was so similar to one in the bottom of John's drawer that it took him a moment to realize it wasn't exactly the same wool button-front he owned - a brown one Sherlock had particularly hated to such an extreme that the taller man had threatened to experiment on it with acid until John stopped wearing it. It suited the aged man well. Just one more thing Sherlock had been right about, he really did dress like a man twice his age. John really needed to stop thinking about Sherlock.

"Um, afternoon," the man started to say.

"I'm afraid Mrs. Hudson isn't in," John hurried to say. He wasn't too keen on getting involved in his landlady's love life. Cheers to her for still being in the game, but John considered the little bits he did know about Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. Turner's evening activities to be more than adequate.

"I'm Sherrinford Holmes," the man clarified, shuffling a bit awkwardly. "Sherlock never... Well, perhaps we could do this inside? I'm... I'm his father."

"Oh. Come in, then," John said as he stepped back out of the way. The older man followed John up the stairs quietly. Sherrinford's eyes roamed all over the place while John made the automatic, polite offer of tea and set about heating the kettle, pulling down the pot he used for nice company, measuring out some nice loose-leaf Earl Grey Sherlock had bought just before... John blinked himself away from that thought as his hands finished assembling the tea service.

"I should have visited," Mr. Holmes said as John set down the tray on the coffee table, nudging aside a bit of clutter leftover from the initial boxing-up of Sherlock's things. "This is nice. Much better than his last flat. I couldn't stand it there, the one time I stopped in. It was tiny, packed nearly to the ceiling with stuff he'd accumulated. I swear the building was about to come down around us, and the landlord scared Violet so terribly she swore she'd never come back. I'd called him once to ask if this flat was in a fit state to come by for tea. I can see why he got so cross at my insinuations, he'd have assumed I knew the building was fine already. He had told me his business had picked up enough he could afford a proper place, and then I suppose I could have looked up the address to find out what sort of place it was before I spoke to him."

"I put most of his things in his room. I didn't really, ah, have any clear idea what to do with them or where to send them. It's all just... boxed and waiting," John said and slid one of the cups over. His left hand shook too much to trust it these days. "No one has said anything about it."

"You know, I'm a bit of a moron," Sherrinford said as he fixed his tea. It was exactly the way Sherlock took it, and now John knew where Sherlock got his skill at blindsiding people with non-sequiturs. "At least compared to my family. That's what I get for falling in love with a woman who could think circles around me: children who could beat me at chess by age seven. Do you know how I would beat them at their games?"

"How?" John asked, leaning forward and sipping his tea.

"Stopped playing chess, took up dice. Worked around them as much as I could, like today. I've been trying to get your phone number since the funeral, but just after I asked Myc for it you were suddenly impossible to look up. Once he told me it wouldn't be a good idea for us to talk I couldn't even access your stories - he was a bit surprised that I had read them, though I don't know why. I'm not one for computers, sure, but of course I'd want to read about what Sherlock was up to. Sherlock had told me you were his 'logger' when I called a while back and I had to ask around what that meant. Used that google thing to find it and figured I had better read it carefully. Since it was public, Sherlock would expect me to know all about the things you wrote when we next spoke. You know how he is, with the expectation that people know things he deems obvious. So it bothered me that it was all suddenly gone: not just because I wanted to contact you, but also because I wanted to re-read it. Except that I was out and about running errands and stopped at the library the other day, and your thing came up just fine. I realized you were still living here and figured the simplest way to get my eldest to stop doing things he shouldn't would be to just come here in person and prove he's being an overcautious fool."

"Not sure why he'd do that," John admitted.

"Because you are too important."

"I'm just his flatmate. Was. I was his..."

"Bullshit, if you'll pardon my language," the elder Holmes countered. "Sherlock put you down for everything."

"What, in his will? I know he had the flat paid for through..."

"As next of kin for everything from registering you as his emergency contact with NHS on down to permission to access his finances and legal proxy."

"What?"

"See, I was fairly sure he hadn't told you, and if he hadn't Myc wouldn't even with what happened. My sons aren't good with emotions. It's where they make their mistakes, and this was a huge mistake. Myc handles strong emotion much better, but he keeps everything at arms length so he can have an eye on it. Lack of trust in himself, at the root, though he'd swear up and down it wasn't true if he heard me say so. I'm fairly certain he'd work himself into a proper rant about rational thought if he was here. He's a thinker, not a feeler, if you understand, and if he feels something he sits still and figures out why he does before he acts on it. Won't trust a gut instinct unless he can rationalize it. Sherlock adored his brother growing up and tried to be the same way, but he just isn't. They were polar opposites on that score, at least as far as their natural inclination, though they worked themselves into a froth trying not to be when they were small. He should have been an artist, or should have been treated like one growing up instead of immersed in their logic puzzles all the time, but I let my family bully me about a lot of the time even when I felt like I shouldn't."

"I do understand how Sherlock handled emotions, or more properly how he didn't handle them." John nodded along, letting the man talk as much as he wanted to. It was nice, to hear about Sherlock as a kid. It was hard to picture, but of course, Sherlock hadn't sprung fully grown from the aether. He hadn't missed that Sherrinford didn't refer to Sherlock in the past tense. That was fine. Everyone grieves in their own way, in their own time. It had only been a month since Sherlock decided to jump off a roof. Maybe listening to Mr. Holmes would help John move on, too. It should do, in fact, if it dispelled some of the mysteriousness around his friend. "You can't beat yourself up for it, though."

"What Sherlock did, not the jump but with his paperwork, is... Well, in my day we'd only talk about it in euphemism. A silent marriage, to use the least crude terms. It's what was done before the laws changed about homosexual couples, though in that case, you would have changed all your paperwork too. The last time Violet - oh, they still call her Mummy and I do love that about them - the last time Violet kicked up a ruckus about grandchildren it was the first Easter Dinner after she'd started volunteering for a children's egg hunt on the church grounds. They both stopped speaking to her until that Christmas and neither of them comes to Easter Sunday anymore. I finally had enough after a while of her complaining to me and set her straight. I told her that our boys had two very different reasons but it amounted to the same thing at the end of the day. She wasn't going to get what she wanted. Myc couldn't be less interested in chaining himself to one woman - his sense of honor won't let him cheat on a wife and he is so sure he wouldn't be faithful he doesn't even pretend to make promises to the women he spends time with. I'll eat my shoe if he isn't paying child support, not that he'll admit a thing about it. Sherlock once told us... oh, what were the exact words? He told Violet he was asexual homo-romantic, and to do her research. She was too focused on how rude he'd been to look it up, but I did. Found a better word for what he'd described while talking to a friend with a queer daughter: Demi-sexual. He doesn't like me correcting him, because I'm a moron and I've only known him his whole life, but then he really blew his top when I said that sort of thing was more common among the Autistic community than the general population. That was a rough patch between us, though he forgave me for being a moron eventually. I'm fairly sure he came round to agree with me, not that he said so directly of course." John's phone started to ring but he hurriedly shushed it without looking.

"He was autistic?" John asked quietly.

"High-functioning sociopath sounds more accurate to you?" Sherrinford asked, a mild edge coming into his voice for a moment before it went back to a perfectly polite tone. "That's where the drugs came from. He claims to have deleted most of it intentionally, but I think it affected his memory a bit and he just doesn't want to say. He was on prescriptions since he was six that were probably always too strong and I'd made noises about it a few times, but again, I'm a moron. The medicine got rid of his meltdowns, but I kept trying to say he needed to learn to handle them instead. That it was alright if he had a tantrum once in a while, he was a child after all. Just because Violet and Mycroft were so cool-headed didn't mean Sherlock had to be the same, and he might take after me a bit more. I'm the type to get a bit flustered over a good film, but Violet was always solid as a rock. I said that just shoving some pills in him so he would behave was the easy way out, but Violet claimed I was too busy to really understand how bad it was for him. That I didn't see how much it hurt him to lose control. The doctors said it was safe and proper, and it wasn't my specialty or place to take over the nursery issues.

"I was an ambassador, you see, and got my degree in History. I traveled the world for the good of the crown, working to dangle the carrot alongside the military sticks I worked with, and I wasn't going to be absentee and ruin my family the way I saw my colleagues doing. I didn't trust myself to stay faithful if I was away as much as I needed to be, that's where Myc gets that. So, I brought them along. We lived in the embassy compounds usually, with the boy's educations taken care of with tutors when the local schools were inhospitable. Some of the places I was sent... The cold war was on, and that's just the most obvious part. We weren't always safe, but we were together and I figured that was the lesser of two evils. So, between being cooped up behind compound walls and having to put on a proper show as a perfect British family, my wife paid the finest doctors to diagnose and treat the problem of Sherlock's meltdowns. It seemed so reasonable each time they suggested upping the dosage. You might start to notice a pattern here, but eventually my patience ran out on the experts who knew so much better than me. I pointed out that if he'd developed a tolerance to the medicine so quickly that they had to keep raising it so frequently, then he was going to reach a point where he'd have more medication in his veins than blood."

"I've actually seen that in patients of mine, children with dosages that have crept up over time for chronic conditions," John admitted. This really did explain a lot about Sherlock. He'd never really swallowed the sociopath line, and he'd tried to poke Lestrade back at Baskerville to see if his theory about Sherlock's actual psychology was more than just John having a hammer and looking for a nail. He'd finished a professional development class a month before the Baskerville case that updated him on the things to look for in his patients that might flag them for a psych referral, and with Autism being both frequently in the media and commonly misdiagnosed by worried mothers on WebMD there had been a decently long section on it. When Lestrade took the lightly delivered comment as a bit of a joke he gave it up as a bad job. He had quite a lot of other things to think about in the wake of Baskerville and never put any additional thought to the matter.

"Then you know how stubborn people can be about it," Sherrinford prompted, taking a long sip from his cup.

"Oh, very much. It's usually taken as an insult, like I'm calling them bad parents when I'm really just doing a body weight to dosage calculation and pointing out that they might want to start looking at their options. I only ever give them a referral, as I'm not a qualified specialist, so I'm actually a bit sorry for the bloke that has to catch all that indignant fury on the other end."

"So maybe you won't blame me for what I did, as terrible as it was. When I took my next assignment I brought Sherlock but left my wife home. Myc had just settled in his own flat instead of the University dorm. Sherlock was thirteen. I cut all his medications in half and didn't refill them when they eventually ran out without consulting any of his doctors. The... The withdrawal he went through gave me nightmares, and then he was an emotional powder keg for months. I knew enough not to cut him off cold, but at the time I didn't actually appreciate how much he'd been taking. I know now that I could have caused him permanent injury, but thankfully he didn't actually get any of the worst side effects - no seizures or dangerous fevers. The shakes, nausea, and weight fluctuations were bad enough, though. He settled down quite quickly, considering. When I am in a mood to punish myself for what my youngest went through, I wonder if he was ever actually Autistic at all despite the collection of doctors who had treated him for it. Sometimes a high price tag gets you the best quality, but sometimes you pay people enough and they tell you what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear. Then, once he was diagnosed, why question it? I hadn't quite noticed how very different the boys were at the core of themselves when it all started. It could have just been tantrums caused by a young boy trying to be something he was not, exacerbated by a well-meaning, much older brother who he spent all his time with and who also didn't understand why Sherlock couldn't be cool-headed and calm in front of the other diplomatic families like he could." The older man took a sip of his tea, his eyes unfocused as they looked through the unlit fireplace. "There is six years age difference between them. It wasn't just personality; it was basic maturity too, and Sherlock hated being too young for things from the moment he understood the concept. I believe what Violet said about him being upset by losing control of his emotions was true, but I think we handled it all wrong in our rush to fix it as fast as possible." John's phone rang again and he shut it off.

"The problems with food never seemed to go away, you even mentioned them in your blog a little," Sherrinford continued, "but the violent tantrums of his nursery days never came back. He did lock up from sensory over-stimulation a few times, the only symptom I couldn't put down as being a phantom we created as it pre-dated the medication. He blamed me for having that come back, but only in the beginning when he was angry and shouting at everything. When he was calmer, near the end of the year we were away by ourselves, he thanked me for giving him the chance to make himself better. He was glad he didn't need the drugs anymore, proud that he'd healed once the crutches were torn away. He told me he'd constructed boxes in his mind to give everything a proper place and as a shelter from the things that overwhelmed him. I encouraged him to envision it as something with more personality, just in case the chaos ever did get back in. He came back to me a couple weeks later and said he'd make it into a palace since he was his mind and that was where he really lived, with his body just the shell that moved him around. I was just glad he was happy, attending classes without any special needs accommodation, and expressing actual pleasure at things about himself that weren't a carbon copy of Myc for what I am fairly sure was the first time. He was coming into his own, and I was proud of him.

"All of that was shot to pieces when he went to university. He'd been pushed into higher level classes thanks to all the home tutoring he'd gotten when we were abroad. Violet encouraged the tutors to go at whatever pace the boys could handle so when they returned to British soil they were promoted immediately. He passed out of school at age sixteen. Myc had done it at fifteen, but then I'd taken Sherlock for that one year and his academic studies took a back seat to getting him properly well. I always considered it a tie, though, again, moron speaking." John was amazed at how little sarcasm came out when Sherrinford Holmes referred to himself as a moron. Every time the man said it it was with a calm acceptance instead of the raging frustration John would have felt. It was impressive that he could speak so calmly about how the rest of his family disregarded him most of the time and still not give up caring about them. "Kids can be cruel when they feel threatened by another's achievements, to themselves as much as to others. His classmates bullied and pestered him as being the youngest in the class from the start, but it was worse in university where he was the only child amid adults. Myc dealt with that too, but he had taken a gap year before starting University. They both really deserved to have one since they'd passed out early, and it had helped Myc sort out who he was and what he wanted to do with his life. Sherlock felt like he needed to catch up to his brother and went straight for his chemistry degree. You can't catch up seven years' difference." Sherrinford huffed out the last sentence and paused to wet his throat.

"He started using illegal drugs in University, to fix himself the way the drugs had fixed him before," John guessed.

"Exactly so," the older man said with a sigh. "It was actually very well controlled for the longest time. A carefully measured dose of a stimulant, not that far off the mark of what he might have been prescribed if he'd gone about it the right way given what was in his old prescriptions. He claimed it was the only thing that stopped his mind from tearing itself apart when he couldn't focus and his keen senses filled him with useless noise. He used for a couple years before we found out, and there were blazing fights for ages after we did, but then something changed suddenly to knock things out of balance and I still don't know what. None of us do, Sherlock refused to say anything and even Myc couldn't figure it out. God, they used to be so close. Sherlock seemed healthy and in control, so much so that you'd never know he was taking street drugs, and then when he was twenty-one he suddenly overdosed. I think, maybe, he didn't tip over the line by accident or gradually increase his use until he overdid it. I think something happened to make him decide one day to take everything he had on him at once with no intention to live through it. We had to cut him off financially and force him into rehab twice, and he landed himself in the hospital three more times before it was sorted. One of the times the police got involved he managed to solve a case for them while in a holding cell overnight. He perked up after that, stopped fighting us so hard. Found his calling I think, or sorted out whatever had tipped him over so badly. Then, he went back to finish his masters in organic chemistry so we'd unfreeze his accounts, started his detective business the second we did, and as far as I know, he's been clean this whole time."

"Drug and alcohol abuse always starts out as something under control, until it isn't," John offered.

The flat was silent for a long time. John refreshed their cups and remembered that Mrs. Hudson had left him some scones. He set them out while his mind worked through the story his best friend's father had come here to tell him. He'd gotten an even more direct confirmation that Sherlock considered himself asexual. 'Married to my work' wasn't subtle. The homo-romantic bit was a novel concept in John's experience, but easy enough to parse. Sherlock was attracted to men despite having no sex drive to speak of. John was too polite to look up demi-sexual on his phone in front of company, though he knew enough about the root words involved that he wasn't completely lost. Something between asexual and... whatever the technical term for average people was. That Sherlock had arraigned all his affairs to make John the legal equivalent of his spouse was a shock. He might be wrong but surely some of that would have required him to know about it. Forms to sign and the like, though maybe Sherlock had talked his brother into using his vague government job to get that done. He was glad for the long story about how being medicated for Autism as a child had led to Sherlock's later drug use both because he'd wanted to know more about his flatmate's past for ages and because it put distance between the bombshell that Sherlock had almost-legally on-paper-but-not-actually married him and the point where John was expected to make any sort of reciprocal offering in contribution to the conversation.

Sherlock's actual given name was William, something John had found out by reading the way his official post was addressed, and Sherlock was the first of his two middle names. That Sherlock chose to call himself Sherlock instead of William or Scott when his father's name was Sherrinford seemed immensely significant just now. John had hated his own father from the age of seven, when he'd become old enough to properly understand the reality of his home life and why it was so broken. Regrets aside, at least this man had loved his sons and tried his best. John could see that clear enough. The fact that his other names had been quite common might have factored into Sherlock's choice, and if he'd been asked about it yesterday that was the answer he would have given, but it no longer felt like the real reason anymore.

"You should know, it wasn't romantic between us. Whatever he might have done on paper, he told me in very clear terms that I could drop it or leave the one time I brought it up. We were best friends," John said quietly. He was trying very hard to hold it together. Sherrinford was the picture of British composure, but then he was a seasoned diplomat. If John showed a few cracks, well, it was hardly fair because the man's son was dead, but at least the elder Holmes was likely to be gracious about it. "We watched each other's backs, aside from a few notable missteps, and even good friends butt heads sometimes. Most of it worked out with barely a word said, like when I first moved in and we had to divvy up chores. Turns out we were both particular about different areas - and weren't terribly particular about the bits the other cared about aside from generally wanting them clean. It was my kitchen and his bathroom, essentially. As annoyed as I could get at a mess left on the worktop he'd get just as snappy about a wet towel left on the tile."

John could practically hear Sherlock hissing about how simple it was to take the towel up to his room, despite the fact that that meant carting it back and forth needlessly and that John could usually retrieve it to toss in the basket next to the washing machine with the used kitchen towels before Sherlock spotted it crumpled on the floor on laundry day. Usually. Unless he got distracted by something. That was a recurring argument that hadn't made it onto his blog. What Sherrinford said about it the blog being public information gave John pause. The accusations that Sherlock was a fraud caught on so quickly because what he did was so fantastic. Maybe John could write a bit about that sort of mundane thing now that Sherlock was gone. Get it out, and let people see that he was a complete person and not just the character that John's writing sometimes made him seem. Not that he lied or bent the truth, but he did omit a lot and he certainly skewed his editing for all sorts of emotional reasons - not just protecting client's names and the like. He knew he wouldn't put up anything about the autism - Sherlock would return from the grave to strangle him with his laptop cord if he dared put something like that in public view.

"I edit a lot out of what I write because it is public and we're both rather private people. Um, if there was a case you like but wanted to know more about or... I don't mind giving you a fuller picture," John added.

"Oh, that would be lovely," Sherrinford said with a warm smile. "How about you start off with how you met. Did you really agree to move in without knowing him at all?"

John starts from the proper beginning, with the bullet wound in Afghanistan. He explained the bone infection that wasn't content to just bother his humerus or scapula, nearly killing him a second time and resulting in a limp that wouldn't go away even months later when he'd been given a clean bill of health. From there the stories poured out of him: skimming over the deranged Mr. Hope, the black lotus, and Moriarty to focus on the clients in between the big ones that Sherlock could solve easily. John talked about how they frustrated Sherlock by not providing the genius with a proper challenge despite paying the rent. He also spoke of the crimes that disgusted them both, but that John never blogged about to protect the victims: divorced parents making their children into chess pieces in their spiteful games, resulting in faked or real kidnappings; sexual crimes where the victim did not want to go to the police for fear it would get out, and wanted them to dig out some other skeletons from the perpetrator's closet to damn them with; and crimes where a technically guilty party was actually morally correct where John burned his notes and Sherlock neglected to report anything to the Met.

The conversation jumped around a little, with Sherrinford asking questions and referencing events from Sherlock's childhood that were the apparent sources of certain oddities and inclinations. Sherlock's love of lemon cream biscuits, the one foodstuff John had to practically smuggle into the flat in since they would vanish from the cupboard as soon as the detective discovered them, had started when he was four. A two-for-one special once proved that the tall git was covetous enough of the treat that he was either not above hiding the second box in his room or perfectly fine risking a stomach ache by scoffing the lot in a single day. Sherrin ford chuckled a bit at that and said it didn't surprise him in the least.

The hours passed quickly and they probably would have gone on talking about Sherlock's cases into the wee hours of the morning if they weren't interrupted by a very insistent knock on the door. Mycroft attempted to bully his father out of the flat, hissing out what was likely something overly private about John being a suicide risk into the older man's ear. Sherrinford answered with a loud declaration that he knew exactly what he was doing and an insistence that it was Mycroft who was in the wrong. John ended the argument by remarking on the late hour and handing the elder Holmes a business card that listed John's cell number as the alternate contact for Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective. John had objected to them being handed out except in special circumstances, as he was most certainly not a secretary. They were scattered all over the flat: a half-dozen wedged under one of the coffee table legs to keep it from shifting, destroyed by cleaning up spills of powdered chemicals, tucked in books to mark places, and so on.

Worrying about John killing himself was ridiculous. Not because John hadn't thought about it, but because it was quite obvious he wouldn't go through with it. Sherlock had pulled John from that dark place. Falling back into it would undo one of the most important things Sherlock had done for John. The gratitude he'd felt for that action had carried John through the worst of Sherlock's behavior. It would see him through this until he sorted himself.

John fixed himself a bowl of tinned soup and robotically went through his evening routine. It had only been a month. If Mycroft thought his continued grieving was inappropriate then that was proof enough John could go on grieving a while longer. He had a few things to think of, though. Details about Sherlock's life that put context to some of his oddities. It helped. It was a new puzzle, actually. Yes, something for his mind to work on, that was just what he needed.

John stayed up through the night poking at his laptop and re-reading his blog. By dawn, he'd convinced himself of what he needed to do to heal and move on with his life. He would write a book. A proper one and not just a compilation of blog entries. His early blog posts were a mess of typos and were kept short by his general incompatibility with technology, so there was a lot of improvement to be had. It would take time, maybe a year or more, but he'd get it all done properly starting from the beginning. He was sure he could get a printed copy of Sherlock's website from before he shut it down in a fit of pique over how much more popular John's blog was if he asked someone tech-savvy the right way. There had to be a backup or something - his old Army commanders were always warning their subordinates that anything put on the Internet could never really be deleted or kept private.

Properly smiling for the first time in weeks, John pulled an empty notebook from a box of them Sherlock had bought for them to use on the better cases. Since he still couldn't write quickly on a computer, he'd just do it the old fashioned way and type it up at the end. It reduced the chances that Mycroft's spying could look in on what John was working on as well, and anything that frustrated the icy man was a plus. He'd make himself into one of those insufferable people writing a novel in the corner of a coffee shop, but at least he'd be out of the flat and being properly social more often. If he managed to finish before the public interest fully died off he might even make a tidy sum off the book. It would be productive, something to focus on. Maybe he'd have enough to break it up into volumes or let his imagination fabricate fictionalized sequels.

The Work was what Sherlock lived for. John now had Work of his own. He'd be fine. It was all fine.


End file.
